Renewing my Acquaintance with Mr. Rooter

Having removed the basement drain, it seems our next low point is the drain outside the back door. Unfortunately, we don’t actually use this door, so discovery of the problem came a little late. I will spare you the photos.

Moving Closer to Having Television

Time to start terminating some of our cable, because I’m having drywallers come in next week to drywall the bath ceiling and garage wall, and I’d like to move our cable modem to a Safe location where it won't become cemented in joint compound.




Westlake Electronic hooked me up with SNS connectors (the coax ends) and a Thomas&Betts combination coax stripper/crimper tool. HomeTech Solutions has a great site showing how to crimp.



It really was quite easy, and worked on my first try, although I had a moment of panic when the cable modem worked, but the wireless router didn’t. After an hour or so of frantic diagnostics, I realized that the cable company had given me a 1 GHz splitter. Replacing this with a 2 GHz splitter did the trick.

I've also crimped the location closest to the TV, so if we should do something drastic, like subscribe to cable,
we could actually see it.


The book Sunset Wiring Home Networks was a rather helpful resource, available of course from Amazon.com, or from the Seattle Public Library after I return it.

Finally A Garage Wall

Carpenter Jim has framed in our new garage wall, and I've put up my new Fave - JM encapsulated insulation.

Fire Door is of course from Frank's The Door Store.

The Raspberry Crop

On the back of our lot, Dorothy planted a long row of raspberries, which have not yet succumbed to my Black Thumb of Garden Death, so we have quite a Crop to use. I’ve been collecting about 4 cups/day, which is a lot of berries for two people to use without turning into a big Raspberry.

I tried making a raspberry pie, which was quite disappointing really as it just tasted like a Generic Berry Pie, rather than preserving the flavor of the raspberries. I've been bringing berries to every summer gathering, foisting them off on friends, even having my parents U-Pick. And still they keep coming.

I’ve been taught the cookie sheet trick of freezing berries – line the berries up individually, unwashed, on a cookie sheet, cover with aluminum foil, let sit overnight in the Ginormous Freezer, then remove the berries from the cookie sheet and put them in a plastic freezer bag. This way one can thaw out a few berries at a time, rather than one Unified Blob of Berries.

While We're At it, How about Television?

Since the basement is exposed, now is the easiest time to run low voltage cable and network wiring to various places within the house. We've been living with merely one coax cable line running in to the basement, which is a step up from Dorothy's existance, where there were zero coax cable lines. We do not know if she favored rabbit ears, or was simply TV-free.

I have a decided that we need 15, count ‘em, FIFTEEN outlets for network & cable. For the network/cable boxes, we figure we will run 3 cat 6 lines and 1 cable – this will give us the opportunity to have up to 2 data, 2 phone, and television from every outlet location. Excessive? Not for two techno-geeks like us!

Sadly, once I saw the materials bill, I thought otherwise – $389 for 1000 feet of Belden 1694A quad shield coax cable from Westlake Electronic, and another $429 for 2000 feet of Systimax Cat 6 cable from Accu-Tech. We actually needed closer to 3000 feet, but Martin had managed to find 1000 feet on Ebay and squirreled it away some time ago.

Why Cat 6, and not Cat 5? We are not content with a paltry 100 Mbps!

Really, although Cat 6 is a premium cost, and Cat 5 no doubt fulfills all our basic network needs, the real work here is pulling cable, so we might as well go for the best so we NEVER have to do this again.

We are setting up our central network panel and terminate cable and cat 6 in our future “utility room”. You can get off the shelf panels from Leviton, but we'd like the flexibility to use the components of our choosing, so we're going with the Sheet of Plywood option, where we will simply make our own termination panel, mounting the components to the plywood.

And here it is - just a bunch of cables at this point.

Because having the Basement torn up just isn't chaotic enough

....While we're at it, why not put in a fan in the main bathroom. The existing joists aren't big enough (which may say scary things about the bedrooms above it), so we're dropping the ceiling 4" to accomodate the fan and oh, perhaps a ceiling light, as long as we are in there.

Our bathroom experience has gone from Dismal to Grim.

Ode to JM Encapsulated Insulation

JM Comfort Therm Encapsulated Insulation is so good, Someday people are going to write songs about it.

Carpenter Jim turned me on to it. It's wrapped in plastic, so you don't finish up a day of insulation looking and feeling like you got trapped in a blackberry bush. It doesn't cost much more than than the Kraft-backed stuff that itches like crazy, and it's mold resistant. What's not to like?